Youth employment and imagined futures in rural Africa

16 April 2015

Gaps are all the rage in international development. Researchers justify their funding applications by identifying knowledge gaps; agronomists in Africa are preoccupied with the yield gap; and the gender gap is widely used to frame systematic differences between men and women in education and health outcomes, in labour markets and in agricultural productivity.

Our recent work with secondary school students in rural Ghana highlights another important gap, but before we introduce it some background is in order.

Development challenges of our time

It is increasingly acknowledged that the creation of employment opportunities for young people is among the major development challenges of our time. Youth unemployment and underemployment are associated first and foremost with wasted human potential; but also exclusion and entrenched inequality, unsustainability, and in some cases civil and political strife.

There is clearly no magic wand, a few waves of which will create jobs. Young people’s engagement with the world of work cuts across a number of policy areas and ministry domains beyond simply employment, including education and skills, economic development, and youth. Policy coherence is critically important; as is the realisation that most new jobs will be created by private sector actors.

To increase the work opportunities available to rural young people in Africa, government policy and development programmes tend to highlight two potential pathways:

Entrepreneurship, and here the suggestion is that with a more vibrant entrepreneurial culture, new skills and access to capital, young people should be able create their own jobs. In August 2014 the Ghana government established the Youth Entrepreneurship Support (YES) Fund (Ghana Cedi 10 million; US$ 3 million), to 'help Ghana's young and innovative population turn great ideas into thriving business enterprises'. This is but one example of the growing ‘turn to entrepreneurship’.

For many policy makers and development professionals, the combination of agriculture and entrepreneurship is the sweet spot for employment creation for young people in rural Africa. To put it another way, the imagined futures for rural young people that are embedded in government policy and much development programming are entrepreneurial, self-employed, rural and agricultural.

An imagined future

How do these imagined futures compare with those that rural secondary school students imagine for themselves? In a recent study we worked with 38 students (18 male, 20 female) in two secondary schools – one in Ashanti Region and the other in Northern Region. We used Q Methodology to explore their perspectives concerning two questions:

Firstly, the dominant perspectives of the students consistently suggested that desirable jobs were formal, salaried and professional. There was only the slightest hint that they imagined themselves in the future as entrepreneurs; and within the dominant perspectives there was little positive enthusiasm for farming as a job.

Second, it was striking how consistently helping others or making a contribution to society or the nation were seen as making a job desirable. While there were clear differences in emphasis in relation to the importance of, for example, money, recognition, respect and personal development, in both schools the idea of making a contribution permeated students’ sense of what made a job desirable.

Pointing to the “imagination gap”

We suggest that these findings point to an important “imagination gap” (see left hand panel of the figure below) – between the imagined employment futures for rural young people that are embedded in policy and development programming (entrepreneurial, self-employed and agricultural), and the employment futures imagined by the secondary students themselves (professional, formal and salaried jobs). The existence of this gap greatly increases the probability of implementation failure in relation to youth-oriented employment policy and programmes.

How can the gap be closed?

To reduce the probability of implementation failure the imagination gap must be closed.

There are two options:

Bring the imagined futures of the students closer to the ideal of policymakers by, for example, convincing the young people of the need to be practical and realistic, that there are opportunities in agriculture, and that life in the city is not always rosy.

Policymakers and development professional should reimagine the future – and specifically the nature of the economy and society, and the role of the state vis-à-vis young people. Such a reimagining would provide an opportunity to think big and to be ambitious, and allow the imagined future embedded in policy to move closer to and align with the futures that students imagine for themselves.

In this light, we argue that the change has to come from policymakers and development professionals. At present, the current approach to tackle the youth employment problem in Africa embodies our first suggestion. That is, that students need to change and lower their sights to fit with the vision of policymakers and development professionals. However, there is no doubt in our minds that the better way to close the “imagination gap” requires policymakers and development professionals to match the optimism, idealism and ambition of the young people they are seeking to support.